To an increasing extent, touch-sensitive panels are being used for providing input data to computers, electronic measurement and test equipment, gaming devices, etc.
In one category of touch-sensitive panels, known from e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 3,673,327, a plurality of optical emitters and optical receivers are arranged around the periphery of a touch surface to create a grid of intersecting light paths above the touch surface. Each light path extends between a respective emitter/receiver pair. An object that touches the touch surface will block certain ones of the light paths. Based on the identity of the receivers detecting a blocked light path, a processor can determine the location of the intercept between the blocked light paths. This type of system is only capable of detecting the location of one object (single-touch detection). Further, the required number of emitters and receivers, and thus cost and complexity, increases rapidly with increasing surface area and/or spatial resolution of the touch panel.
In a variant, e.g. shown in WO2006/095320, each optical emitter emits a beam of light that diverges across the touch surface, and each beam is detected by more than one optical receiver positioned around the periphery of the touch surface. Thus, each emitter creates more than one light path across the touch surface. A large number of light paths are created by sequentially activating different emitters around the periphery of the touch surface, and detecting the light received from each emitter by a plurality of optical receivers. Thereby, it is possible to reduce the number of emitters and receivers for a given surface area or spatial resolution, or to enable simultaneous location detection of more than one touching object (multi-touch detection). However, this is achieved at the cost of a reduced temporal resolution, since the emitters are activated in sequence. This may be a particular drawback when the number of emitters is large. To increase the temporal resolution, each emitter may be activated during a shortened time period. However, this may result in a significant decrease in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).